A GOP legislator in Tennessee has introduced a bill that would set bail at a higher amount for undocumented immigrants involved in serious or fatal car crashes. State Rep. Joe Carr’s bill would automatically treat them as a flight risk and make it harder for an undocumented immigrant to be free on bond before a trial. “I’m trying to make it more difficult for those who are here illegally to jump bond, so they appear in court,” Carr told the Tennessean. But a civil rights attorney in Tennessee said Carr’s bill would conflict with state law that sets specific criteria for what constitutes a flight risks — as well as the Eighth Amendment. “An individual’s bail must be set on an individualized basis,” said Jerry Gonzalez. “It cannot be based on some broad principle that is supposedly applied to everybody.”

Internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green reveal that the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers, Microsoft, and other top corporations, is planning to develop a “global warming curriculum” for elementary schoolchildren that presents climate science as “a major scientific controversy.” This effort, at a cost of $100,000 a year, will be developed by Dr. David E. Wojick, a coal-industry consultant.

“Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective,” Heartland’s confidential 2012 fundraising document bemoans. The group believes that Wojick’s project has “potential for great success,” because he has “contacts at virtually all the national organizations involved in producing, certifying, and promoting scientific curricula.” The document explains that Wojick will produce “modules” that promote the conspiratorial claim that climate change is “controversial”:

Dr. Wojick proposes to begin work on “modules” for grades 10-12 on climate change (“whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy“), climate models (“models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial”), and air pollution (“whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions”).

Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact (“environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather“), for Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on.

Wojick will receive $5,000 per module, with twenty modules produced a year. Wojick, who manages the Climate Change Debate listserv, is not a climate scientist. His doctorate is in epistomology.

The Heartland Institute also runs the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, a conspiracy-theorist parody of the Nobel-prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Heartland’s NIPCC project “pays a team of scientists approximately $300,000 a year to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered.” Their climate-denial work is funded anonymously.

James M. Taylor, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, told ThinkProgress Green in an e-mail why the group is developing its denier curriculum:

We are concerned that schools are teaching climate change issues in a manner that is not consistent with sound science and that is designed to lead students to the erroneous belief that humans are causing a global warming crisis. We hope that our efforts will restore sound science to climate change education and discourage the political propaganda that too often passes as “education”.

Right-wing ideologues, fueled by the fossil fuel industry, have been increasing their efforts to pollute science education in elementary schools. These attempts to hijack children’s education piggyback on the religious right’s war on biology education and the science of evolution. The National Center for Science Education, which has long led the defense of evolution education in elementary schools, has begun a new program to fight global warming denial in textbooks and classrooms.

A plurality of Americans — 46 percent — say the primary cause for the nation’s deficits is that “wealthy Americans don’t pay enough in taxes,” according to a new United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection poll. Just three percent blamed too much federal spending on the elderly, and just 14 percent blamed too much federal spending on poor people. Meanwhile, 80 percent oppose cuts to Medicare, 75 percent oppose cuts to Social Security, and nearly two-thirds oppose cuts to Medicaid. Perhaps for those reasons, Americans prefer President Obama’s budget, which raises taxes on the rich and preserves Medicare and Social Security, by a 10-point margin over the one proposed by congressional Republicans.

As Saint Petersburg, Russia, prepares to adopt a law banning the “propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexualism and transgenderism” to minors, Members of the European Parliament are joining nations around the world, including the U.S. and Australia, in condemning the proposed censorship. Yesterday, MEP Michael Cashman spoke out against the bills, saying that “what is wrong is the promotion of intolerance and discrimination, precisely what these repressive laws set out to achieve.” Watch it:

Sophia in ‘t Veld added that “Tchaikovsky and Constantinovich must be rolling over in their graves.”

Some stories are so complicated that they require considerable effort on the front end in order to yield dividends down the road. Alcatraz is not one of them. A quarter season of largely generic maneuvering has been in no way necessary to buttress any kind of narrative architecture. The show has been laboring with a set-up that is – to use two similar culinary metaphors – both half baked and under cooked. All that said, it seems that Alcatraz is finally inching toward deploying its various elements to some effective purpose.

Last night’s episode felt like, in most ways, a major step forward. There are still some major problems related to Alcatraz’s most basic premise. Another week, and another psycho from the past is running around in the present day, commit crimes because he’s been programmed to do so or because it’s simply his nature – or, perhaps, both. This time it’s xxxx, who is a serial land-mine deployer. Um, yeah. Okay. I will say that when land-mine wielding Paxton Petty, first shows up, I thought we were going to have a grade-A badass on our hands. Madsen sees him at the scene of the crime, chases him down, and gets the drop on him – until Petty hurls a land mine at him. How cool is that? Except, that’s his last cool moment of the episode. For the rest of the show, he just looks creepily at people and digs in the sand a lot. Meanwhile, Madsen is hot on his trail and figures out exactly how to track him down by asking a couple of people some probing questions. She’s good at police work, that one. Soto tags along, trying to convince himself and everyone else that he has some purpose in the investigation and in the story. Having a Soto geek moment-of-the-week is simply not enough, though I appreciate that this week it was a reference to Sandman – the original pulp Sandman, not that Neal Gaiman stuff.

Alcatraz’s real strength has been its flashback sequences to the prison in the 1960s, but in the past couple of weeks, those segments have fallen off, delivering less dramatic punch and serving more to explicate the less satisfying contemporary narrative. This week, at least, the two timelines are bridged in ways I found interesting.

Since she was shot and rendered comatose in the second episode, there have been hints of a connection between Hauser and Lucy, and this week we get more of the picture, including a budding romance between 1960s Hauser and Lucy. This raises some very interesting questions: mainly how is it that Lucy and Beauregard have come forward in time and Hauser has not; and if they possess time travel know-how themselves, is there some opposing power that possesses the same technology? We also got to learn something about Lucy’s sophisticated reprogramming techniques, which involve ice cold water boarding followed by tea, sedatives, mints and electrocution.
The moments with Lucy and past-Hauser, as well as present-Hauser, are among the most dramatically compelling of the series so far, and they demonstrate the degree to which the show needs to give its characters more emotional life. Efforts to flesh Madsen out by introducing a wise-cracking bomb-squad pal fall short, especially since this guy is so marked for death he may as well be wearing a red shirt and be on his last day of the job. Soto being smitten with a dorkily-inclined medical examiner may have some charm value, but its only a temporary distraction from his irrelevance to the show.

As for Petty himself, despite his early promise, he proves to be the show’s most phoned-in villain thus far. He sets mines because he likes blowing people up. He won’t reveal the location of his mine fields because he’s a messed up Korean War veteran with a grudge. The efforts to keep him from setting more mines, and the hunt to find a long-hidden mine field, are marginally interesting at best – though the latter ends with another cool Hauser shoot-em-in-the-leg sequence, which, for my money, never gets old.

Finally, we get despondent Hauser abducting a dying Lucy from the hospital to the super secret neon lit prison and delivering her to Beauregard’s care, with the implication that he will be able to do things non-time-traveling medical science can’t. If that’s the case, why hasn’t she been in his care all along? Maybe we’ll find out, but maybe this is just sloppy writing. Alcatraz hasn’t given us a compelling reason to believe it must be one or the other.

The other truly interesting moment this episode was the exchange between Past-Lucy and past Tommy-Madsen, about Tommy’s endless stint in the infirmary. He offers to provide information on an investigation if Lucy will try and find out why he is living in a hospital bunk and giving blood constantly. Hopefully something interesting will come of this.

Ultimately, this episode advances some key elements, the show’s reluctance to give its audience large chunks of substance is befuddling. If we are not yet ready to find out what is going on under the prison, and who/what lives there, at least remind of that the question is still open. Give us something to go on about who is behind the time traveling prisoners, and a little piece of the why puzzle. Show us more about why characters are the way they are. Now that Hauser has stepped into the third dimension, can we hope for similar treatment for Madsen? And for the love of God, give Jorge Garcia something more substantial to do other than reminding us of his character on a better show.

David Liss is the author of seven novels, most recently The Twelfth Enchantment. His previous books include A Conspiracy of Paper (2000) which was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the 2001 Barry, MacAvity and Edgar awards for Best First novel. The Coffee Trader (2003) was also named a New York Times Notable Book and was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the year’s 25 Books to Remember. A Spectacle of Corruption (2004) was a national bestseller, and The Devil’s Company (2009) has been optioned for film by Warner Brothers. Liss is the author of the graphic novel Mystery Men and writes Black Panther for Marvel Comics as well as the forthcoming series, The Spider, from Dynamite Comics.

Today, the ACLU is inviting LGBT advocates to send President Obama a simple Valentine’s Day message: “Our right to love doesn’t evolve, We’re born with it.” It has been 476 days since President Obama first said that he was “evolving” on the question of marriage equality.

Note from Alyssa: With a glut of shows set in Washington—and more specifically, in the halls of power—set to hit television screens this year, comparisons to The West Wing are inevitable. But while that show set a high-water mark for political programming, does that mean that its characters were actually good at politics or at running the country? My colleague Ian takes a look at the man who occupied the Oval Office.

For seven seasons, the West Wing was therapy for thousands of Bush-weary progressives who fantasized about being governed by a Nobel Prize winning scholar who didn’t believe that high-income tax cuts were a panacea. Now that America actually is governed by a Nobel Prize winning scholar with a real domestic policy agenda, however, it’s time to be honest about President Bartlet’s legacy. While ability to rhetorically shameconservatives made him an appealing fantasy, the substance of Bartlet’s policies ranged from uninspired on issues like health care to downright destructive on Social Security and education. Bartlet had a lackluster economic record. He gave away a seat on the Supreme Court to the far right, and he consistently favored symbolic cultural victories over real opportunities to make life better for American families.

If you set aside the budget-busting Bush tax cuts, George W. Bush was actually a better president on domestic policy than President Bartlet. So Bartlet expanded Medicare to cover mammograms and cancer clinical trials? President Bush actually signed a prescription drug plan for seniors. And while George W. Bush at least had the decency to allow his plan to turn Social Security over to Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers die a politically embarrassing death, Bartlet worked with Republicans to pass a massive Social Security reform at a time when Republicans’ were single-mindedly focused on privatization. If the Bartlet Social Security plan had actually been in effect when the market bottomed out in 2008, millions of American seniors would have been left with no safety net to fall back on.

Besides trashing Social Security, the Bartlet Administration had few bold ideas. What was the Bartlet plan to ensure universal access to health care? Or the Bartlet plan to combat global warming? What did President Bartlet do to close the education gap between poor and rich children? Or to ensure that every child who does succeed in high school will be able to pay for college? If anything, his education policy was as much a betrayal as his Social Security debacle. Although the first term Bartlet White House had ambitious plans for education reform, the second term Bartlet wound up supporting school vouchers.

After nearly an entire term in the White House, Bartlet’s economic record was so dismal that it is a miracle he was reelected. Consider his attempt to literally defend this record before God (who he also calls a “feckless thug”): “3.8 million new jobs, that wasn’t good? Bailed out Mexico. Increased foreign trade. 30 million new acres of land for conservation. Put Mendoza on the bench. We’re not fighting a war.”

3.8 million jobs sure sounds like a lot, but at the time Bartlet made this speech, it added up to just over 90,000 jobs during each month of his presidency — far less than the country needs just to keep up with population growth. This kind of stagnant growth could be excused if President Bartlet, like President Obama, presided over our emergence from an historic recession, but the Bartlet Administration experienced no similar economic calamity.

Bartlet does deserve credit for appointing Justice Mendoza, but the Mendoza appointment is overshadowed by his egregious decision to appoint Justice Christopher Mulready. Mulready’s appointment came about as part of a compromise to ensure that Senate Republicans would also confirm a chief justice whose very personal experience with Roe v. Wade would otherwise make her unconfirmable. While there is certainly symbolic value to having a chief justice who once had an abortion, such symbolism will come as cold comfort to the millions of American families impacted every time Mulready joins his fellow conservative jurists engaged in a systematic campaign to rewrite the law to leave workers and consumers powerlessagainstthe wealthy and the well-connected.

President Bartlet had his moments — they just rarely had much to do with economic justice. Bartlet was a strong supporter of both gay rights and reproductive freedom, for example, and he deserves credit for negotiating a peace between Israel and Palestine. Ultimately, however, his presidency advances a very small kind of liberalism that appeals mostly to people who’ve never worried if they could pay their medical bills or if their children can afford college.

President Bartlet’s inattentiveness to the 99 percent cannot be dismissed because economic justice doesn’t make good television. Screenwriters could not design a better villain than James Clark McReynolds, the Supreme Court Justice who systematically undermined FDR’s New Deal and routinely referred to President Roosevelt as a “crippled son-of-a-bitch.” Lyndon Johnson’s transformation from southern segregationist to civil rights crusader reached a climax that literally brought Martin Luther King to tears. President Obama’s drawn out battle over the Affordable Care Act is riddled with the kinds of crushing defeats, unexpected setbacks and narrow triumphs that fiction writers dream of recreating.

Ultimately, the Bartlet Administration was a failed opportunity because President Bartlet never once sought out these kinds of battles. Protecting choice or welcoming gays into the military (something the Bartlet Administration supported but never accomplished) are important prongs of the progressive agenda, but a liberalism that’s uninterested in income inequality or ensuring that no American ever dies because they cannot afford to treat a curable disease is both a recipe for electoral defeat and a tragedy of moral neglect.

Two weeks from today, voters in Michigan will hit the polls for the state’s Republican presidential primary, where native son and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — once thought of as the GOP’s inevitable nominee — is now trailing former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Romney’s father, George Romney, is a former governor of Michigan and was the CEO of the now-defunct American Motor Company, a Detroit-based automaker that was once one of the biggest in the world.

Romney has often played up those ties on the campaign trail — he won Michigan’s primary in 2008 — and attempted to use them to his advantage three years ago when he penned a New York Times editorial titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” The editorial was a response to President Obama’s plan to rescue the American auto industry, and as evidence has emerged that Obama’s rescue plan worked, Romney had attempted to claim that he came up with the idea first.

Ahead of the primary, though, Romney published another editorial on the rescue, this time in the Detroit News, in which he renewed the “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” call he first made in 2009:

My view at the time — and I set it out plainly in an op-ed in the New York Times — was that “the American auto industry is vital to our national interest as an employer and as a hub for manufacturing. Instead of a bailout, I favored “managed bankruptcy” as the way forward.

Managed bankruptcy may sound like a death knell. But in fact, it is a way for a troubled company to restructure itself rapidly, entering and leaving the courtroom sometimes in weeks or months instead of years, and then returning to profitable operation. […]

By the spring of 2009, instead of the free market doing what it does best, we got a major taste of crony capitalism, Obama-style.

In the editorial, Romney, whose former company profited from a government bailout, called on the government to sell its shares in GM and return the profits to taxpayers. In other words, Romney is fine with destroying the company when it isn’t succeeding, but then wants to seize its profits if it turns around.

Meanwhile, he continues to ignore the success of the rescue plan he criticizes. Chrysler posted its first profit more than a decade in last year and expects those profits to continue growing in 2012. It has added 9,400 jobs since its rescue and plans to add 1,600 more at a plant in Illinois this year, and the success of Chrysler and General Motors has helped American automakers control more than half of the industry’s market share. The industry has hired enough workers to make up for all those laid off during the recession, and American and foreign automakers plan to add 167,000 jobs at American plants this year.

Romney isn’t just ignoring facts — he’s also ignoring a Republican who is close to the situation. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) has warned candidates against criticizing the bailout and touted its success. “I would have had some differences on how they did it, but I’m not going to second-guess it,” Snyder told the New York Times. “The more important thing is the results. And the auto industry is doing very well today.”

We can’t solve the climate crisis without China’s commitment to reducing carbon emissions and deploying more clean energy. But the geopolitical stakes are so high and so complicated, building enough trust to get swift, meaningful action from an emerging powerhouse like China isn’t easy.

As China undergoes another major political transition this year, it’s important for us to understand how national security, energy and economic issues all influence the American-Chinese relationship — and how that may impact action on climate change.

Below, a few China experts at the Center for American Progress flesh out how those issues may evolve. While the piece does not explicitly deal with climate negotiations, one can see how changes to the country’s manufacturing sector, military standing, and information flow could impact how China chooses to address climate. — S Lacey

by Rudy deLeon, Melanie Hart, Ali Fisher

This week, President Barack Obama is meeting the man who will steer China forward over the next decade. Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping is clearly a man that Americans need to get to know.

Vice President Xi will almost certainly become the next General Secretary of the Communist Party of China—China’s top leadership position—in November 2012. His visit will offer a taste of how the United States will interact with the next generation of Communist party leaders.

Xi Jinping will hold China’s highest political position, but he will not rule the country alone. Back in Beijing China’s current leaders are negotiating furiously among themselves to select a crop of seven to nine cadres that will serve as the country’s next “board of directors” on the Politburo Standing Committee. The candidates for those positions are a fascinating group. They include a well-known finance guru, an apparent reformist who recently made press for his delicate handling of land protests in Guangdong, and a red-flag-waving nationalist who is making a movie about his mafia-busting campaigns in the Chinese west even as his chief lieutenant disappears under a cloud of controversy.

As this intriguing group is preparing to take the helm in Beijing, the United States is realizing that the China we are dealing with today is not the China we have grown accustomed to over the past few decades. U.S. policymakers are waking up from a long post-September 11 war in the Middle East and realizing that, while our attentions were focused elsewhere, China has grown and changed dramatically. To keep up, our foreign and economic policy approaches to China will have to change as well.

On the economic front Chinese enterprises are no longer serving only as cheap workshops for manufacturing U.S. products. For years China also has been throwing massive resources into training engineers in select industries of the future and building world-class research and development centers—particularly in the clean energy sector. Now those investments are paying off. China has suddenly gotten much better at producing the types of technologies that our nation is used to dominating. That could be good for the United States in some ways but very tricky in others. To complicate matters, China’s national government in Beijing and those at the provincial and local levels are giving Chinese companies an edge over U.S. companies by deploying state capitalist policies that our current trade institutions are not designed to address.

In the foreign policy realm, China is becoming increasingly important to the United States not only in the Asia-Pacific region but also globally. On the Iranian nuclear issue, for example, pressing Beijing to reduce its support for the Iranian regime continues to be a major part of U.S. strategy; yet in Syria, China’s recent veto in the United Nations of Arab League-backed action against the brutal Assad regime made U.N. action impossible. Indeed, in Libya, in Sudan, everywhere U.S. diplomats look China is there.

On the positive side, we are also seeing that China is beginning to understand that it is in their interest to not be isolated on global issues such as Iran and nuclear nonproliferation. This development is in part the result of U.S. actions that include moves to persuade China to act in the interest of the global community.

These steps by the Obama administration include actions to address the concerns of our allies in the Asia-Pacific region. In the military sphere, for example, Chinese naval and fishing vessels have grown increasingly bold in their skirmishes with the U.S. navy in the South China Sea, where coastlines are shared by several of our key allies. What’s more, the Chinese military has demonstrated it can use ground-based missiles to shoot down satellites in outer space and is using cyber tactics to penetrate the United States in ways that we are just now scrambling to figure out how to deal with.

But at the same time China is growing strong in an international sphere, the country is facing greater challenges internally. The Chinese Communist Party is struggling to figure out how to maintain their authoritarian system in a society that is becoming increasingly more dynamic. China now has more Internet users than any other country in the world—and these netizens are exerting more pressure on their leaders than ever before. Unlike the Tiananmen era, Chinese leaders no longer perfectly control information. Their citizens are passing information around so quickly that the regime can barely keep up, forcing them to pay more attention to public issues that the people care about such as environmental protection, food safety, and even landholding rights.

This flood of information about leadership corruption and other injustices in China is spurring even more local protests. While Beijing works hard to make sure these local protests stay isolated, it’s unclear whether that strategy will always work.

China’s next generation of leaders is well aware of all of these problems. They are learning different ways to use the public attention to their advantage over their rivals. Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai is the most obvious example. Bo is constantly courting media attention, turning local politics into a fascinating soap opera that even the foreign press is becoming addicted to. Just this week Bo’s local chief of police—who is well known across the country as the “mafia buster” who wears a bullet-proof vest and carries a gun everywhere he goes—reportedly fled to the U.S. consulate to seek asylum after an apparent falling out with Bo. Now the local government—which reports to Bo Xilai—claims the runaway police chief has been sent off to receive some form of “vacation-style treatment” for job-related stress.

For the first time since the 1949 revolution, the Chinese press is covering every twist and turn of this and other newsworthy political developments, which is opening up the black box of elite Chinese politics in ways that we have never seen before. That will be critical not only for the Chinese public but also for the United States because the only way we can get smarter about dealing with this rising China is to get smarter about dealing with the Chinese leaders and the Chinese people themselves.

On major issues—trade, foreign policy, and potentially military relations—interests within China could grow increasingly diverse, not only among the Chinese people but—at least in some cases—possibly among the core leaders themselves. That can present both pitfalls and opportunities for the United States. Vice President Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States, then, marks the beginning in many ways of a new relationship with China.

Getting to know Xi and his colleagues and rivals, as well as his nation’s problems and promise, is very important.

– Rudy deLeon in Senior Vice President for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress. Melanie Hart is a Policy Analyst on China Energy and Climate Policy at the Center. Ali Fisher is a Policy Analyst and Manager of the Center’s China Studies program. This is a CAP repost.

Last night, Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School Board voted to approve a “Respectful Learning Environment” curriculum policy that will finally allow faculty and staff to affirm LGBT students’ identities. It replaces the troublesome “neutrality” policy that prevented school officials from discussing sexual orientation, thereby creating a toxic environment for students who went unprotected from anti-gay bullying.

The Southern Poverty Law Center praised the change, but said it plans to proceed with the suits it has filed on behalf of students who were subject to harassment under the policy:

Today is the first day in nearly 18 years that Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District no longer has a harmful policy that singles out lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students. Although we would have preferred for the District to have repealed this stigmatizing policy without replacing it, we are pleased that the new policy expressly requires district staff to affirm the dignity and self-worth of all students, including LGBT students.

The repeal of this policy is an important first step, but the District must do much more to create a safe, welcoming, and respectful learning environment for all students, including LGBT and gender non-conforming students, and those perceived as such.

Rolling Stone magazine recently profiled the district and the trauma students have experienced, particularly losing friends to suicide. School officials called the portrayal “grossly distorted” and attempted to downplay the negative environment, refusing to take any responsibility for the impact of the “neutrality” policy. The Parents Action League, a radical group of conservative parents that promotes ex-gay therapy and calls AIDS a gay disease, continues to object to the school “caving” to the “demands of the homosexual activists.”